‘I say,’ Twoflower whispered. ‘She’s a real terror when she’s roused, isn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ said Rincewind’, without enthusiasm.
‘All right, all right,’ said the shopkeeper, visibly cowed.
‘And then you can let us out,’ Bethan added.
‘That’s fine by me, I wasn’t open for business anyway, I just stopped for a few seconds to get my bearings and you barged in!’
He grumbled off through the bead curtains and returned ith a cup of water.
‘I washed it out special,’ he said, avoiding Bethan’s gaze.
Rincewind looked at the liquid in the cup. It had probably been clean before it was poured in, now drinking it would be genocide for thousands of innocent germs.
He put it down carefully.
‘Now I’m going to have a good wash!’ stated Bethan, and stalked off through the curtain.
The shopkeeper waved a hand vaguely and looked appealingly at Rincewind and Twoflower.
‘She’s not bad,’ said Twoflower. ‘She’s going to marry a friend of ours.’
‘Does he know?’
‘Things not so good in the starshop business?’ said Rincewind, as sympathetically as he could manage.
The little man shuddered. ‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ he said. ‘I mean, you learn not to expect much, you make a sale here and there, it’s a living, you know what I mean? But these people you’ve got these days, the ones with these star things painted on their faces, well, I hardly have time to open the store and they’re threatening to burn it down. Too magical, they say. So I say, of course magical, what else?’
‘Are there a lot of them about, then?’ said Rincewind.
‘All over the Disc, friend. Don’t ask me why.’
‘They believe a star is going to crash into the Disc,’ said Rincewind.
‘Is it?’
‘Lots of people think so.’
That’s a shame. I’ve done good business here. Too magical, they say! What’s wrong with magic, that’s what I’d like to know?’
‘What will you do?’ said Twoflower.
‘Oh, go to some other universe, there’s plenty around,’ said the shopkeeper airily. ‘Thanks for telling me about the star, though. Can I drop you off somewhere?’
The Spell gave Rincewind’s mind a kick.
”Er, no,’ he said, ‘I think perhaps we’d better stay. To ee it through, you know.’
‘You’re not worried about this star thing, then?’
‘The star is life, not death,’ said Riricewind.
‘How’s that?’
‘How’s what?’
‘You did it again!’ said Twoflower, pointing an accusing finger. ‘You say things and then don’t know you’ve said them!’
‘I just said we’d better stay,’ said Rincewind.
‘You said the star was life, not death,’ said Twoflower. ‘Your voice went all crackly and far away. Didn’t it?’ He turned to the shopkeeper for confirmation.
‘That’s true,’ said the little man. ‘I thought his eyes crossed a bit, too.’
‘It’s the Spell, then,’ said Rincewind. ‘It’s trying to take me over. It knows what’s going to happen, and I think it wants to go to Ankh-Morpork. I want to go too,’ he added defiantly. ‘Can you get us there?’
‘Is that the big city on the Ankh? Sprawling place, smells of cesspits?’
‘It has an ancient and honourable history,’ said Rincewind, his voice stiff with injured civic pride.
‘That’s not how you described it to me,’ said Twoflower. ‘You told me it was the only city that actually started out decadent.’
Rincewind looked embarrassed. Yes, but, well, it’s my home, don’t you see?’
‘No,’ said the shopkeeper, ‘not really. I always say home is where you hang your hat.’
‘Um, no,’ said Twoflower, always anxious to enlighten. ‘Where you hang your hat is a hatstand. A home is —’
‘I’ll just go and see about setting you on your way,’ said the shopkeeper hurriedly, as Bethan came in. He scooted past her.
Twoflower followed him.
On the other side of the curtain was a room with a small bed, a rather grubby stove, and a three-legged table. Then the shopkeeper did something to the table, here was a noise like a cork coming reluctantly out of a bottle, and the room contained a wall-to-wall universe.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ said the shopkeeper, as stars streamed past.
‘I’m not frightened,’ said Twoflower, his eyes sparkling.
‘Oh,’ said the shopkeeper, slightly annoyed. ‘Anyway, it’s just imagery generated by the shop, it’s not real.’
‘And you can go anywhere?’
‘Oh no,’ said the shopkeeper, deeply shocked. ‘There’s all kinds of fail-safes built in, after all, there’d be no point in going somewhere with insufficient per capita disposable income. And there’s got to be a suitable wall, of course. Ah, here we are, this is your universe. Very bijou, I always think. A sort of universette . . .’
Here is the blackness of space, the myriad stars gleaming like diamond dust or, as some people would say, like great balls of exploding hydrogen a very long way off. But then, some people would say anything.
A shadow starts to blot out the distant glitter, and it is blacker than space itself.
From here it also looks a great deal bigger, because space is not really big, it is simply somewhere to be big in. Planets are big, but planets are meant to be big and there is nothing clever about being the right size.
But this shape blotting out the sky like the footfall of God isn’t a planet.
It is a turtle, ten thousand miles long from its crater-pocked head to its armoured tail.
And Great A’Tuin is huge.
Great flippers rise and fall ponderously, warping space into strange shapes. The Discworld slides across the sky like a royal barge. But even Great A’Tuin is struggling now as it leaves the free depths of space and must fight the tormenting pressures of the solar shallows. Magic is weaker here, on the littoral of light. Many more days of his and the Discworld will be stripped away by the pressures of reality.
Great A’Tuin knows this, but Great A’Tuin can recall doing all this before, many thousands of years ago.
The astrochelonian’s eyes, glowing red in the light of the dwarf star, are not focussed on it but at a little patch of space nearby . . .
‘Yes, but where are we?’ said Twoflower. The shopkeeper, hunched over his table, just shrugged.
‘I don’t think we’re anywhere,’ he said. ‘We’re in a cotangent incongruity, I believe. I could be wrong. The shop generally knows what it’s doing.’
‘You mean you don’t?’
‘I pick a bit up, here and there.’ The shopkeeper blew his nose. ‘Sometimes I land on a world where they understand these things.’ He turned a pair of small, sad eyes on Twoflower. ‘You’ve got a kind face, sir. I don’t mind telling you.’
‘Telling me what?’
‘It’s no life, you know, minding the Shop. Never settling down, always on the move, never closing.’
Why don’t you stop, then?’
‘Ah, that’s it, you see, sir—I can’t. I’m under a curse, I am. A terrible thing.’ He blew his nose again.
‘Cursed to run a shop?’
‘Forever, sir, forever. And never closing! For hundreds of years! There was this sorcerer, you see. I did a terrible thing.’
‘In a shop?’ said Twoflower.
‘Oh, yes. I can’t remember what it was he wanted, but when he asked for it I – I gave one of those sucking-in noises, you know, like whistling only backwards?’ He demonstrated.
Twoflower looked sombre, but he was at heart a kind man and always ready to forgive.
‘I see,’ he said slowly. ‘Even so —’
‘That’s not all!’
‘Oh.’
‘I told him there was no demand for it!’
‘After making the sucking noise?’
‘Yes. I probably grinned, too.’
‘Oh, dear. You didn’t call him squire, did you?’
‘I – I may have done.’
‘Um.’
‘There’s more.’
‘Surely not?’
‘Yes, I said I could order it and he could come back next day.’
‘That doesn’t sound too bad,’ said Twoflower, who alone of all the people in the multiverse allowed shops to order things for him and didn’t object at all to paying quite large sums of money to reimburse the shopkeeper for the inconvenience of having a bit of stock in his store often for several hours.
‘It was early closing day,’ said the shopkeeper.
‘Oh.’
‘Yes, and I heard him rattling the doorhandle, I had this sign on the door, you know, it said something like “Closed even for the sale of Necromancer cigarettes,” anyway, I heard him banging and I laughed.’
‘You laughed?’
‘Yes. Like this. Hnufhnufhnufblort.’
‘Probably not a wise thing to do,’ said Twoflower, shaking his head.
‘I know, I know. My father always said, he said, Do not peddle in the affairs of wizards . . . Anyway, I heard him shouting something about never closing again, and a lot of words I couldn’t understand, and then the shop – the shop – the shop came alive.’
‘And you’ve wandered like this ever since?’
‘Yes. I suppose one day I might find the sorcerer and perhaps the thing he wanted will be in stock. Until then I must go from place to place —’